Teaching in the Community College

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A collaborative course designed for faculty and adjunct instructors. We share resources, knowledge, and experiences about teaching and learning. We use reflective techniques that can lead to enhancement of professional practice and personal satisfaction. We uplift and support instructors who are facing challenges and we applaud those who jump hurdles with aplomb. Together we celebrate the wonderful realm of the teacher. We guarantee that you will learn something new. As an aside, it's a great networking opportunity.

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Goal: to engage in the Scholarship of Teaching

§  To help teachers frame questions about their teaching and their students’ learning

§  To design the systematic inquiry that opens up those questions.

§  To examine the beliefs, values, assumptions and other thinking processes behind teacher behaviors

§  To support knowledge-building about discipline-specific practices and student learning, a condition of Excellence in Teaching.

§  To advance the personal satisfaction and professional development of participants

Text:

Lowman, Joseph. Mastering the Techniques of Teaching. Second Edition, 1995. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Company.

Projects: We ask that you select 2 projects as your contribution to the knowledge-base of the whole group:

  1. Select one chapter from the Lowman text for presentation to the class. Present the material as something to be learned by the class---we hope everyone will read the chapter ahead of time, but you should probably outline the highlights as you see them. At best, your presentation will be a review for those who have read (and forgotten); at worst, your presentation will be new information for those who have not read the chapter.
  1. Read and dissect one of the articles offered on-line* for the class. You should assume that the participants have NOT read your article, so you should copy the article or prepare some sort of handout for the class so that all will learn from your research.

*Note: hard copies of articles not yet on-line will be available each week, depending on the interests of the group.

A Sample Syllabus: Participants in the class will select topics for reading and discussion, so the weekly syllabus will evolve according to those topics.

Week 1: Talking About Teaching

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning -- framing the questions

The Practice of Reflection --- Collecting and Interpreting Data

Reading: “The Scholarship of Teaching “ (Change Magazine)

“ That Elusive Spark” (Education Week)

“Teacher Learning That Supports Student Learning” (Educational Leadership, 1998)

Assignment: The Master Chess Player/ The Master Teacher (Journal Entry)

What do you know about teaching just because of some situation you have

encountered in the past?

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Week 2: Topics for Exploration--Searching for articles via Blackboard

***********************************************************************Week 3: Classroom Management: What the Master Teacher Knows

Comments/ Reflections on Articles from Week 1

Video (portion): Teaching With Love and Logic

Reading: “Affective Development in the Classroom” (Roueche)

Assignment: Complete Teaching Goals Inventory and Worksheet

Reflections about what’s happening in your classes (students and/or teacher (Journal Entry)

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Week 4: “Affective Development in the Classroom” -- Comments and Applications

“Stages of Development in the Teacher” (Mina Shaughnessy)


First Meeting:

1.  Introductions: How we got here/ Why we stay

2.  Introduction to the idea of the Course—Frank

3.  Introduction to the idea of the Course – Gayle

  1. Encouraging candidates to talk about teaching
  2. Goals : personal and professional development > relaxed atmosphere in which to reflect on what is actually happening in your classes; to put you in touch with literature which sheds light on our actual situation and to put you in touch with your colleagues, both sources of energy.

4.  The syllabus and texts, with more possibilities – Frank

5.  Introduction to the Scholarship of Teaching – Gayle

6.  Assignment: What the Master Teacher knows


Welcome!

You have probably enrolled in this class because you recognize that there is so much to learn about effective teaching. Unfortunately, for most of us, our graduate education focused on concentration and research in the subject field, with little or no attention placed on preparation for teaching.

The result has been that, as faculty members, we have depended on the role models we encountered in graduate school. This dependence has led us to some mythical assumptions about how students learn:

·  That verbal transfer is an effective mode of teaching

·  That college students have long attention spans

·  That if teachers prepare well and keep talking, nothing bad can happen

·  That authority and truth reside in the figure behind the lectern

(Eble, 1988, p. 206)

Faculty members who have not had the opportunity to learn about the principles of teaching and learning may still contend that students can learn the same ways they always have, but with the increasing diversity of college students, their range of approaches to learning has similarly expanded. As students have become more sophisticated and information continues to expand, teaching has become more than a process of dispensing a finite amount of information. It is becoming increasingly clear that educators need to reassess their purpose and function in the current information age.

Traditionally, the center of higher education has been the content, and the role of the instructor is that of an “expert” who knows all and who shares it with the rest of us in a closed classroom setting, preferably through a textbook he or she has authored. Time in the classroom with the instructor is fixed and it is only this time that can be converted into credits. Testing is a matter of ranking students based on how much knowledge they gather and retain for a short period of time. The curriculum is segmented into disciplines and then courses, and grades are the primary indicator of learning.

However, current research relies heavily on the theory that learning is about making connections (neurological, social, cognitive, affective). If that theory holds water, then learning is about what students do, and the role of the teacher is to facilitate systemic and strategic thinking on the part of students. Through systemic thinking, we see how what we learn has meaning for our lives. Through strategic thinking, we are able to focus our energies on things that count in the rest of our lives.

This course will allow you to do both kinds of thinking: systemic and strategic. The outcome of this course should be some personal capacity in teaching that will serve you the rest of your life, whether it is the ability to assess what is happening with your students, or the ability to design your course in a way that your students have life-changing outcomes as a result.